Obama and the Pirates

The administration of President Barack Obama is certainly owning the successful
rescue
of Americans held hostage by pirates in the seas off Somalia, holding it up
as the epitome of what our rulers would like us to believe is a pragmatic,
tough-minded, and decisive administration, and touting
it as the Obamaites first overseas military success. Yet, barely a few hours
after the dramatic rescue was made – complete with a display of sharp-shooting
skills surpassed by none, and a tale of derring-do that featured a self-sacrificial
captain and a crew determined to see him safely home – the problem with this
sort of grandstanding was and is all too clear: the pirates are back, and with
a vengeance, hijacking four
more ships in 24 hours.

Which brings us to the question: is the United States military going to be
rescuing each and every victim of pirates in the seven seas, ceaselessly sailing
in whenever some off-course yacht is boarded by bad guys in the troublesome
waters off the East African coast? If so, they’ll be plenty busy for the next
decade or so, and they will doubtless have to cut down on their other activities
– say, guarding our own coastline – in order to play superheroes of the seas.

An earlier rescue, that time carried out by the French, underscored the dangers
inherent in such operations: one
hostage was killed, along with three of the pirates. Aside from the problematic
nature of such military actions, however, is the practical question of when
to attempt a rescue and when to refrain from doing so. Is every act of piracy
on the high seas a casus belli, insofar as these modern-day incarnations
of Captain Hook and his crew are concerned?

The answer is that it can’t be. With Somalia a "failed
state" and its neighbors unable or unwilling to take up the slack in
policing East African waters, the problem is firmly embedded in the region.
The solution, say all too many pundits and alleged
experts, is for the U.S. military, or some combination of the U.S. and its
allies, to intervene on land and nip the problem at its supposed source – the
poverty and statelessness of Somalia.

Yet this is no solution at all, and it raises the same kind of open-ended commitment
– because the same conditions prevail in, say, Mexico,
where drug gangs are now competing with the "legal"
gang in Mexico City for control of the country, or at least some significant
portions of it. Kidnapping-for-profit is a burgeoning
industry – indeed, the only industry that is enjoying boom times. Will the
U.S. send in the Marines every time an American citizen is kidnapped and held
for ransom on land? Or does this newfound anti-piracy militancy apply only to
kidnapping on the high seas?

The principle appears to operate like this: if a hijacking is high-profile
enough, action is warranted. If not – if, say, some hapless American kid on
spring break is scooped up by kidnappers in Tijuana, his parents are presented
with a ransom note, and no one outside the immediate circle of family and friends
takes much notice – then the "principle" disappears.

It’s all about appearances, and reality enters very little into it: that about
sums up the modus operandi and motivating energy of the Obama administration
in this instance. The other day on MSNBC one commentator praised the administration
for turning what could have been a major embarrassment into a public relations
triumph, reveling in the fact that they played it up for all it was worth. In
the end, however, the president and his amen corner will find it was hardly
worth it, as a wave of ship hijackings and kidnappings washes over them – "blowback,"
if you will.

This incident underscores how haphazardly – and stupidly – the foreign policy
of the most powerful nation on earth comes to be formulated and put into practice.
With no clear principle of action – or inaction – the only consistent factor
governing overseas military operations is how and to what degree they enhance
the prestige and power of our rulers. The Obama administration is using the
"war on piracy" to show that their guy is no wimp: he’s ready, willing,
and indeed eager to employ those
magnificent sharpshooters in pursuit of "justice." The Obamaites
claim to be doing just that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, albeit on a larger
scale.

This is supposed to be an administration of levelheaded "pragmatists,"
the perfect antidote for those starry-eyed neocon
visionaries who got carried away with emotion and overreached in their ideological
zeal. What this incident with the pirates reveals, however, is that the present
lot are just as emotionally charged and reactive as their predecessors. One
might argue that the Obamaites were, after all, successful, the hostages were
freed, and all came out well in the end; but recall that the Bush administration,
too, was hailed
for its great "success" in Iraq, at least initially, and war critics
were raked over
the coals in the first few months for their lack of faith in the Bushian
"global democratic
revolution," which was said to be taking off throughout the region
and world. It was only later, when the
bloody reality broke through the miasmic cloud of propaganda, that the whole
perfidious project began to be reevaluated.

The greatest danger is that this upsurge in "piracy" – i.e.,
private individuals engaging in activities that are normally monopolized by
government agencies – will provoke a new wave of pundit palaver calling for
the U.S. to "do something" about the problem by going after the "root
causes." This is code for undertaking a full-scale military and social
engineering project to "rescue" poor little Somalia from the cruel
orphanage of statelessness.

In this scenario, the West will do its moral duty and embark on the first symbolic
step of a major campaign for international economic and moral uplift. A black
American president will extend a helping hand to an African nation without
a functioning state. If, in Afghanistan, our alleged goal is to exact a punitive
justice, in Somalia, or, indeed, anywhere in Africa, it will be deemed a "humanitarian"
act. In more practical terms, however, it would be a project very similar to
what we are attempting in Afghanistan: building a central government from the
ground up – a project sure to gladden many liberal hearts.

The ultimate logic of liberal interventionism boils down to this: if government
intervention is good, per se, on the home front, then why not apply the same
principle abroad? Military action is, after all, the ultimate government action
– and one, need I remind you, that modern liberals have not hesitated to project
overseas. FDR,
LBJ, and JFK
come immediately to mind. And then there was Clinton, whose own foray
into Somalia perhaps prefigures what awaits Obama, if he makes the mistake of
taking his own rhetoric seriously.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo